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"I have always wanted to be a teacher. I love mentoring students interested in working with children from diverse backgrounds. Education can be the key to success for students, and I am honored to help teachers develop the skills to teach ALL students."

Margarita Jimenez-Silva

Professor Margarita Jimenez-Silva, a 1991 graduate of Concordia University, was recently named "California's Teacher Educator of the Year." In March, she and her sister, Norma Hernandez who is also a member of the faculty at Concordia, were listed among Orange County's "10 Women Making a Difference." In June, 2002, the Harvard University Gazette chronicled Margarita and Norma's professional and educational journeys as "The divine secrets of the Jimenez sisterhood."

Before coming to Concordia, Margarita worked as a research assistant in the Language and Culture Department at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and as the mentoring program coordinator/facilitator at Longfellow Elementary School in Cambridge, MA. She co-authored "Vignettes of the Continuous and Family Ties: Some Latino American Traditions" in Chameleon Readers: Teaching Children to Appreciate All Kinds of Good Stories. For her doctoral research she examined the effects of Proposition 227, the initiative that dismantled bilingual education in California in 1998. She looked at the initiative's effects on first-grade teachers in a school that was overwhelmingly Mexican-American. She is also a member of the National Association for Bilingual Education and the American Education and Research Association.